Where the Personal and the Political meet, get drunk and have unprotected sex. (And never, EVER use Oxford commas!)

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Endless Punishment

How do you punish a mass murderer, a Master of War, an
architect of genocide? How could we have brought balance to our moral universe
for the millions executed on the orders of Hitler, Stalin or Mao? Shall we rain
down on Kissinger the sum total of all U.S. aerial bombardment in the Pacific
theater during World War II, as was done to Cambodia at his command? How much
pain should we inflict on George W. Bush for the million-plus deaths caused by
the Iraq and Afghanistan wars?

The leaders of the guilty have few lives to sacrifice on the
Scales of Justice, but there are millions of lives on the other end. The nooses
of Nuremberg seem too humane for these crimes. They are too quick, too clean
for the monsters who managed to keep the blood off of their hands. Shall we
resurrect them to exact an execution for each life taken? Shall we pursue them
through reincarnations, ensuring that each of their next million lives ends in
misery?

This is why vengeance never ends. No punishment that fits
the crime can be anything short of a new crime that reverses the roles of the
victim and the criminal. I feel like a monster just for proposing these
sentences and committing them to (digital) paper. But who of moral clarity and
passionate temperament hasn’t entertained such thoughts?

When does justice become revenge? That could be measured by
the level of emotion invested in the prosecution. But even justice requires
emotion. Science has shown that emotion is needed in order to make the most
basic decisions. Therefore, we must temper our passion with empathy and mercy. Each murder, be it state-sanctioned or not, is a wound that must be treated, not an offensive maneuver in a zero-sum game.